The Diverse Families bookshelf was created and funded through numerous grants. Due to lack of additional grants and the loss of key personnel, the project has come to an end. We have tremendously enjoyed creating this database and hope that it can help bring readers and books together.
Browse by Family Relationship:
-
The Traveler's Gift: A Story of Loss and Hope
Danielle Davison
Liam becomes quiet and lonely after his father, a sailor and a storyteller, does not return from a voyage, but Enzo, the Traveler, offers him a magical gift.
-
The Treasure Box
Margaret Wild
When the enemy bombs the library, everything burns, and only one book survives. As war rages around them, Peter and his father, alongside so many refugees, flee their home, taking with them a treasure box that holds something rarer than rubies and more precious than gold. They journey through mud and rain and long cold nights, and soon survival becomes more important than any possession. But as the years go by, Peter never forgets the treasure box, and one day he returns to find it. This moving story from celebrated author Margaret Wild is illustrated with Freya Blackwood’s subtly affecting artwork, which incorporates pages of children’s books in translation. The result is a haunting and beautiful tale of the power of stories and the resilience of the human spirit.
-
The Trouble with Babies
Martha Freeman
Nine-year-old Holly tries to adjust to a new home with a neighbor who has just invented a de-yukkification device.
-
The Trouble with Cats
Martha Freeman
After a difficult first week of third grade, Holly begins to adjust to her new school and living in her new stepfather's tiny apartment with his four cats.
-
The Truly Brave Princesses
Dolores Brown
Princess Nin is a firefighter, Princess Gilda is a supermarket cashier, Princess Agnes is retired, and Princess Liang is in a wheel chair. This gallery of princesses gives visibility to lot of women who do not fit with the traditional conception of a princess. Maybe it’s time to realize that each and every one of us could be a princess.
-
The Truth as Told by Mason Buttle
Leslie Connor
Mason Buttle is the biggest, sweatiest kid in his grade, and everyone knows he can barely read or write. Mason’s learning disabilities are compounded by grief. Fifteen months ago, Mason’s best friend, Benny Kilmartin, turned up dead in the Buttle family’s orchard. An investigation drags on, and Mason, honest as the day is long, can’t understand why Lieutenant Baird won’t believe the story Mason has told about that day. Both Mason and his new friend, tiny Calvin Chumsky, are relentlessly bullied by the other boys in their neighborhood, so they create an underground haven for themselves. When Calvin goes missing, Mason finds himself in trouble again. He’s desperate to figure out what happened to Calvin and, eventually, Benny. But will anyone believe him?
-
The Truth or Something
Jeanne Willis
Growing up poor and neglected in post-World War II England, young Mick, longing to be part of a loving family as he is shuttled from home to home, must harden himself against disappointment and cruelty--and, finally, against the abusive father he only recently met.
-
The Tummy Mummy
Michelle Madrid-Branch
The true love that inspires adoption is revealed as a birthmother opens her heart, while adoptive parents open their arms for a child.
-
The Ugly Menorah
Marissa Moss
For the first time since her grandfather's death, Rachel feels close to him as she and her grandmother celebrate Hanukkah with the simple menorah that he had made many years ago.
-
The Unlikely Hero of Room 13B
Teresa Toten
Adam not only is trying to understand his OCD, while trying to balance his relationship with his divorced parents, but he's also trying to navigate through the issues that teenagers normally face, namely the perils of young love--
-
The Upside of Unrequited
Becky Albertalli
Seventeen-year-old Molly Peskin-Suso knows all about unrequited love. No matter how many times her twin sister, Cassie, tells her to woman up, Molly can't stomach the idea of rejection. So she's careful. Fat girls always have to be careful. Then a cute new girl enters Cassie's orbit, and for the first time ever, Molly's cynical twin is a lovesick mess. Meanwhile, Molly's totally not dying of loneliness -- except for the part where she is. Luckily, Cassie's new girlfriend comes with a cute hipster-boy sidekick. If Molly can win him over, she'll get her first kiss and she'll get her twin back. There's only one problem: Molly's coworker, Reid. He's a chubby Tolkien superfan with a season pass to the Ren Faire, and there's absolutely no way Molly could fall for him. Right?
-
The Vast Fields of Ordinary
Nick Burd
It's Dade's last summer at home, and things are pretty hopeless. He has a crappy job, a "boyfriend" who treats him like dirt, and his parents' marriage is falling apart. So when he meets and falls in love with the mysterious Alex Kincaid, Dade feels like he's finally experiencing true happiness. But when a tragedy shatters the final days of summer, he realizes he must face his future and learn how to move forward from his past.
-
The Very Kind Koala: A Surrogacy Story for Children
Kimberly Kluger-Bell
The Very Kind Koala is a charming picture book for young children which provides an introduction to surrogacy through the simple story of a koala bear and her husband who needed the help of a very kind koala to carry their baby in her pouch. Parents can begin reading this story to children as young as 3 years of age to begin the dialog about their own helpful surrogate.
-
The Visit
S. Latisha Herbert
A description of a visit of a child in foster care with her other siblings in separate foster homes.
-
The Wall
William Sutcliffe
In an isolated town that closely resembles the West Bank, thirteen-year-old Joshua discovers that his world may not be as it seems; that his people may be aggressors rather than victims; and that he must stand up to his stepfather and forge his own sense of right and wrong.
-
The Warden's Daughter
Jerry Spinelli
Living with her warden father in an apartment above a 1950s prison, Cammie O'Reilly struggles to come to terms with the loss of her mother, who died saving her from harm when she was a baby, and interacts with some of the reformed inmates. This is a tale of loss and redemption.
-
The War That Saved My Life
Kimberly Brubaker Bradley
A young disabled girl and her brother are evacuated from London to the English countryside during World War II, where they find life to be much sweeter away from their abusive mother.
-
The Weight of a Thousand Feathers
Brian Conaghan
Seventeen-year-old Bobby Seed, the devoted but exhausted primary caregiver for his terminally-ill mother and difficult younger brother, finds respite in a support group and good friends, but must face his mother's impossible choice alone
-
The Weight of Our Sky
Hanna Alkaf
Amidst the Chinese-Malay conflict in Kuala Lumpur in 1969, sixteen-year-old Melati must overcome prejudice, violence, and her own OCD to find her way back to her mother.
-
The White Swan Express
Elaine M. Aoki and Jean Davies Okimoto
Across North America, people in four different homes prepare for a special trip to China, while four baby girls in China await their new adoptive parents.
-
The Window
Michael Dorris
When ten-year-old Rayona's Native American mother enters a treatment facility, her estranged father, a Black man, finally introduces her to his side of the family, who are not at all what she expected.
-
The Window
Jeanette Ingold
Mandy survived the terrible accident that killed her mother, but she was left blind and alone. Now she lives with relatives she doesn't know, attends a new school, and tries to make friends--all the while struggling to function without sight. Her unpredictable life takes its strangest turn when she begins to hear the oddest things through the window of her attic room. In fact, what she hears--and seems to "see"--are events that happened years ago, before she was even born.
-
The World of Normal Boys
K.M. Soehnlein
The time is the late 1970s -- an age of gas shortages, head shops, and Saturday Night Fever. The place, suburban New Jersey. At a time when the teenagers around him are coming of age, Robin MacKenzie is coming undone. While "normal boys" are into cars, sports, and bullying their classmates, Robin enjoys day trips to New York City with his elegant mother, spinning fantastic tales for her amusement in an intimate ritual he has come to love. He dutifully plays the role of the good son for his meat-and-potatoes father, even as his own mind is a jumble of sexual confusion and painful self-doubt. But everything changes in one horrifying instant, when a tragic accident wakes his family from their middle-American dream and plunges them into a spiral of slow destruction.
-
They Chose Me: A Story of Grandparent Adoption
Rhonda Beheler
A little boy learns for the first time how he came to live with and be adopted by his grandparents.
-
The Year of the Baby
Andrea Cheng
Anna and her best friends Laura and Camille return in an engaging new story. Anna's family has adopted a new baby from China, but her new sister is not thriving and refuses to eat. When Anna and her friends are assigned a science experiment in school, they decide to use the assignment as a way to help Baby Kaylee.